As Jesus approached the Garradine boundary, he encountered two men coming out of the tombs. This, of course, would be in Gentile country across the lake. These men were possessed by demons and were so savage that no one could travel along that road. With a sudden shriek, they cried out, why meddle with us, son of god? Have you come to torture us before the appointed time?
Some distance away, a large herd of swine were feeding. The demons kept appealing to Christ. If you expel us, send us into that herd of swine. Jesus answered, out with you. At that, the demons came forth and entered the swine.
The whole herd went rushing down the bluff into the sea and were drowned. The swineherds took to their heels. They were scared to death. And upon their arrival in town, related everything that had happened, including the story about the two possessed men. The upshot was that the entire town went out to meet Jesus.
And when they caught sight of him, they begged him to leave their neighborhood. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise be to lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Intriguing as this excerpt from Saint Matthew is and some of the ideas that it raises, I want to go back to the first sentence out of the first from the first reading. It's from the prophet Amos, and it says, seek good and do not seek evil. There you have it. There you have it. Do we seek evil?
Well, Amos says don't seek it, so I guess he's implying that we do seek evil. It's a commonly held view and has been down the centuries and before Christ, this idea that we have a propensity towards evil, that we seek evil in the same way that we say we seek good. And we say we choose evil over the good. The that we say this commonly. It's absolutely commonplace.
Do what what do we mean when we say this? Of course, before you can answer that, you're going to have to ask this yourself this question, what is evil? If you if it is an object of desire or of will, it's got to be a something. You can't will a nothing. And therefore, if it is a something, and if you actually will it or want it or desire it or love it or seek it, then it's got to be actual and real.
And if it's actual and real, then it has to have come from someplace. And where did this evil reality come from? Can you say it came from an omnipotent omnipotent, benevolent, good god? Well, that's an absurdity. Then where did it come from?
And you see where you are, you're right back with the Manichees. Right back with them because you're going to have to say there is some kind of an evil god in the universe. Now you have two gods. Now, I know this is early in the morning to be talking about stuff like this, but I don't think there's anything more significant for your thinking, for the way you handle your lives than to have some proper, adequate, sensible, consistent view of good and evil and this idea of our seeking evil. I now when we're talking this way, we're not talking in terms of theology, except in so far as theology reflects philosophy.
But the point is this is frightfully important. Because if you say you seek evil, then you're then you must have a principle of evil in you corresponding to the evil you're seeking. Therefore, you are, in your very being, evil. Of course, this is exactly what the Luther what the the Protestants, including Calvin, insisted upon in the Reformation sixteenth century. We talk about evil desires.
Do we have evil desires? In what sense are they evil? So this little statement of Amos is certainly thought provoking. He puts it in other words, he puts evil on the same level as the good. And he says, seek the good and do not seek evil.
Then later on he says, love the good and hate evil. Well, that's that's perfectly sound thinking. What I would like to present to you is the traditional view of this matter of good and evil. Goes back to Aristotle, I freely admit it. It was articulated and amplified by Thomas Aquinas, and it is still a valid view.
Because here's my point. If because well, let me begin go back there. This view that I'm presenting says that evil is a nothing, that evil is a nonexisting thing, that it is that the only things which exist are good things, or to convert that proposition, everything which is is good. And if you can speak of any philosophy, adopted by the Catholic church is the is the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Not that the church ever adopted one, but it's the closest thing we have to the Catholic church adopting one.
And you see, you have to come to this conclusion. If everything which is is from god, then everything which is is good. God can't create evil. It's an absurdity to say that. By absurdity, we mean a contradiction in terms.
And so we take our stand that evil is a non existing thing something. It is the absence of a good, and it's a special kind of absence of a good because it's the absence of a good in a being of a certain sort which ought to have it. We say death is a physical evil. Why? Because death is real?
No. The only reality you have with death is a corpse. And there's nothing wrong with a corpse. A corpse is a perfectly good being except our with death, it's a many, many beings. And so we take the stand that evil is, we say, the privation, the deprivation, which is a negation of good, not of any good, but of a do good, of a do good.
To have an apple which has a has a rotten spot in it, we say that's a bad apple. What do you mean when you say that that's a bad apple, physically bad apple? You mean that there that it is that it does not have its integrity of goodness that it should have. Notice that negative. It does not have the integrity it should have.
Now if you see therefore, we and you see how consistent this view is. I know to many people it sounds unrealistic to say that evil is nonexistent when we look around us and we see it all around. I've just been reading some stories of Singer, the famous Yiddish storyteller, and you talk about evil being real. But the thing is, when you think about it, and we've got to think about it, If I tell you not to desire evil, I'm suggesting that you can desire evil. And I'm standing up here and telling you you cannot desire evil.
I'm telling you you cannot love evil. I'm saying it as forthrightly as I can say it. You'll say, well then, how do you explain murder? How do you explain Hinckley? How do you express explain adultery?
How do you explain all the injustices of the world? How do you explain man's inhumanity to man? How do you explain sadism? How do you explain those things? Well, now what do you what are you asking me to do?
Are you asking me to tell you how people do this? That's a big order. But when you but if you say, are you saying that all of these so called evils are nonexisting and are the deprivation of good and that the people who perpetrate them are seeking the good, I reply, definitely I am. Most definitely I am. It may sound almost crazy to say that, but it's not when you come down and analyze any one of these actions.
When a bank teller or a person handling money starts taking home samples, they're not doing it because they are willing, explicitly, and loving the evil crime. Because when you analyze that, is the money wrong, evil? Of course it's not. Is what that money buys evil? Of course it isn't.
Is the satisfactions which come from the use of that money evil? Of course they're not. Then where is the evil of the bank teller taking home samples? You tell me that it's a sin of theft. You tell me that it's an injustice.
And I ask you, what kind of a word is injustice? It's a negative. It's the lack of due justice. And when the man or the woman there helps himself to the till, are they what are they are they aiming to to love the injustice of their deed? That's impossible.
Impossible. You can't love a nothing. You cannot love a nonexistent in the sense of an actuality or a reality. And so in any of these instances, when you analyze them, you will come down to the what is the essence of the in of the evil? And you're going to come up with some, like, words like immorality.
Notice that's a negative. It's the lack of due morality. You're going to come up with such words as unethical. That's a negative. It means the lack of due ethical quality.
You're going to come up with such words as illegal. That is a negative word. It means the lack of due legality, and so on. Now I'm not I mean, I don't want to make too much of the of this matter of language, but please notice that these are all negative terms and they're standing for negative concepts because you can't speak of a negative reality, except insofar as it's a psychological concept or idea. And so what we have to realize, and this is frightfully important, that what we love, what we want, what we tend for, what we seek is the good.
Now we may be mistaken because the good that I seek may be something that I ought not. Notice that negative. That I ought not to be seeking. Adultery is wrong because it involves another person's partner, husband or wife. And the essence of the sin of adultery is that it's an injustice.
Notice it's a negative. It's the lack of due justice. Fornication. What's wrong with that? We say it's an impurity.
Negative. Notice that. And so when Amos says, seek the evil, forget it, he's a very poor philosopher. In the name of the father, son, holy spirit. Amen.